From the Archives: Rick Santorum is Straight

It’s been two election cycles since Robert Draper profiled the man who nearly stole (earned?) this week’s Iowa caucus for GQ. For your weekend longread, have a look at the making of a candidate.

In the commercial, four corpulent and oily Washington insiders are whooping it up in an elegant dining room. Through a swirl of cigar smoke, one of them calls out to the waiter, "Bring us a bottle of your very best champagne!" When the waiter raises the question of cost, the lout adds, "Don’t worry. If we don’t have enough money, we’ll just give the bill to...them!" He gestures to the far end of the room, where a sad cluster of urchins sit around a barren table.

The camera pans to a tall, trim young man with a small child cradled in his arms. In a soft but ringing eastern tenor he introduces himself as Rick Santorum and conveys his disgust for the political fat cats "running up the deficit and passing the bill on to your children and mine." After he pledges to "end their greedy spending practices," the camera cuts to one of the politicos staring at the bill, snickering, "Time for another tax increase!" The commercial concludes with a rousing slogan: JOIN THE FIGHT.

They loved that ad in Pennsylvania. In 1992 voters responded to it by handing Santorum a second term in the U.S. Congress. Two years later, the ad was trotted out again to elect him to the Senate. Funny and poignant, it seduced the viewer with a bit of mystery. Send this courageous fellow into that dining room, it suggested, and see how things change.

This June, more than a decade after the commercial first appeared, Santorum sat at a corner table in the ornate Senate dining room, vanquishing a platter of broiled sea scallops. He looked a bit out of place--a vaguely untutored, overgrown schoolboy with a hook nose and oversize teeth, aura-deficient if handsome in a lopsided way. His hips had widened and a dab of gray had infiltrated his sideburns, yet he still seemed very much the lonely outsider.

But he was not. One by one, the insiders came to him, joking with him, doing everything but mussing his hair. "Hey, bruddah!" called out Pete Domenici from New Mexico, clamping his seventyone-year-old hand on Santorum’s shoulder..

"Now, you keep your name out of the press," admonished the senior senator from Utah, 69-year-old Orrin Hatch, as he flashed his lipless smile.

Even former Oregon senator Bob Packwood, age 70 and nimbly reborn as a lobbyist, sidled up to Santorum’s table to slyly inquire, "Have I been reading about you?"

Santorum laughed a victor’s laugh. Six weeks after he had infamously spelled out his "problem with homosexual acts" to an Associated Press reporter, the resulting firestorm had dissipated into just another sunny day in the clubby Senate dining room. Santorum was still the third most powerful GOP senator on the Hill, still on track to become majority leader by 2006. His hoary colleagues had been through this kind of thing with him before, when Santorum had disrespected President Clinton by repeatedly referring to him as "Bill" on the Senate floor and when he had reportedly called Senator Dianne Feinstein of California a bitch. Now he’d used the words homosexuality and incest in the same context, prompting groans from the moderates and condemnations from the liberals. But from his own, from the right, there came only a big brother’s knowing chuckle: feisty, pesky Rick--what’s he gonna say next?

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